Insecure Self

For ages now, one of my good friends has insisted that I have “self-esteem” issues. She talks in a code only she understands, so I’ve never really understood what she meant. Every so often I find some new way that I have trouble coping and accepting who I am. Recently I realized another.

I was talking to an ex and, without really meaning to, the topic of her current significant other’s social prowess came up. They’re going to political science grad school in a small, insular program. So it’s a close-knit group of people, who see each other and talk to each other a lot. And her current significant other (SO, for short) is very social, and is close friends with many of the students, and many of them share their secrets with him. He’s become something of the department gossip repository.

This was mentioned just in passing, but it’s bugged me since then. Not hugely, but I’ve found myself returning to it repeatedly over the past two days. Even though I’m in a completely different setting from SO, and have a very different personality, outlook, and social capabilities from SO, I found myself jealous. Treating it as a problem that I wasn’t hearing all the secrets of people around me in my department.

But my department is huge. There’s no social life centered around the department. There’s only so much gossip to speak of, and much of it wouldn’t interest me. I generally hate being drawn into other people’s problems, and I dislike dealing with emotional people. Being a gossip maven just isn’t me.

And that’s still difficult to accept. I think this is an example of what my friend was getting at when she harped on (and on and on and on) about self-esteem…